It’s not broken

I have had a lot of pain in my foot this past week. It all started during #longrunthursday last week. During part two of the run, I started feeling some pain in the ball of my foot upon each foot strike. I gave it a day or so to calm down but when I tried running again, I could barely run for 30 seconds without the pain stopping me.

I have become all too familiar with pain this past year and if you have been following my recovery you will already know that from this post, this post, and this post. But in the past few weeks I have gotten to connect with a couple of other folks who had the same tumor and the same reconstruction surgery and they both mentioned the pain which has helped to normalize my experience. As I’ve said before, there’s not a huge body of knowledge on giant cell tumors like there is on ACL repair. So when I hear two people say they experienced something similar, then I count it among the normal in this uncharted area.

Sitting in the waiting room waiting to see the Ortho 51 weeks following the visit where I got the news about the tumor was quite surreal. Of course my head went to some dark places of what it could be–could it be the tumor, was it a stress fracture…and of course then the thoughts of what this means for the Ironman–do I have to back out yet again? Will I ever get to be an Ironman?

I am very happy to report it’s not broken and the quest towards the finish line continues. I have some inflamed metatarsals that needed some rest and extra padding. One medical professional I spoke with about it this week asked me about any trauma to the area and I said none that I could think of. Then he asked me how long my last long run was. When I said almost three hours, he laughed and reminded me that to most feet, that’s considered trauma.